Kimono Fashion: The Consumer and the Growth of the Textile Industry in Pre-War Japan

‘His nation had not changed its costume for over a thousand years’, a Japanese official reportedly told a shipwrecked Spanish trader in 1609, going on to criticise the castaway’s compatriots as, by contrast, ‘so inconstant that they are dressed in a different way every two years’. This incident was famously quoted by Fernand Braudel in The Structures of Everyday Life to demonstrate the significance of clothing fashion as an indicator of the attitudes to tradition and change that stimulated the emergence of capitalism and industrialisation in Europe: ‘the future was to belong to the societies fickle enough to care about changing the colours, materials and shapes of costume’ (Braudel, 1981, p. 323). Braudel in fact went on to outline some of the more material links between the emergence of fashion as a determinant of clothing consumption and the growth of production and trade that was starting to transform key parts of the European economy. Nonetheless, for many years, his hints were largely forgotten, as supply-side analysis of technical and organisational change dominated approaches to the understanding of industrialisation. More recently, however, as research has begun to return the consumer to a central position in economic history, it has ceased to be possible to ignore clothing fashion as a factor in the ‘consumer revolution’ now regarded as a ‘necessary analogue’ to the industrial revolution itself.1